FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT KIDNEY - PAGE 5

Two weeks ago, Renada Daniel Patterson's only kidney, donated by her father, began to fail, prompting a swirling debate when he offered to give her his remaining one. On Friday, even as the medical ethics committee at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center was discussing whether to allow a transplant that would make David Patterson a dialysis patient for the rest of his life, his 16-year-old daughter and her mother announced...

One year ago, Tracey Robinson began a melancholy, thrice-weekly ritual with her 16-year-old son Tristan, leaving their South Side home at 5:30 a.m. to take him for four hours of kidney dialysis at Children's Memorial Hospital. Until recently, the visits came with an extra sense of gloom. The big hospital could be a scary place for Tristan to spend a large chunk of his time, without so much as windows in the unit where he got his treatment. But all that has changed with the hospital's new dialysis center at 2611 N. Halsted St., dedicated Wednesday, which experts say is the first free-standing dialysis facility in the country devoted exclusively to children.

Renada Daniel-Patterson's relationship with her father began when she was 13 years old and he called from prison, offering her one of his kidneys. Renada, born with only one unhealthy kidney, had been on dialysis three times a week for seven years. David Patterson, serving time at California State Prison in Sacramento for burglary, had abandoned Renada when she was a baby. "He called out of the blue," recalls Vicki Daniel, Renada's mother. When he turned out to be a compatible donor, all was forgiven.

Like many 25-year-olds enjoying their youth, Adrian Wheeler has gone about the business of living, without much thought to his health. He plays basketball, romps with his daughter and is preparing for his May wedding. But his body has been busy too. His blood pressure has risen and so has his heart rate. Wheeler knows about hypertension, or abnormally high blood pressure, because his mother and grandmother suffer from it. Back in 1988, a doctor told him he had hypertension too, but he didn't take it seriously.

A kidney transplant recipient and the organ donor filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday against Lockformer Co., blaming the Lisle-based metal fabricator for Daniel Pelzer's kidney disease. Filed against Lockformer, its parent companies and former chemical supplier, the suit by Pelzer, of Lisle, and his sister, Sally Pepping, charges that the defendants' negligence led to releases from 1968 until 1999 of the chemical trichloroethene, TCE, at various locations on Lockformer's Ogden Avenue property.

They get and they get and they get -- this week we focus on one of the tabs' favorite topics: Hollywood's wretched excess. Here we go: - People: Britney Spears had a lavish, Moroccan-themed baby shower, which People chronicles in encyclopedic detail, starting on the cover -- where Britney poses in a half-Demi, proudly showing off her belly. That's not body paint, though; it's a black halter dress. At the shower, guests walked barefoot along a path strewn with thousands of rose petals.

BALTIMORE It took 12 surgeons, six operating rooms and five donors to pull it off, but five desperate strangers simultaneously received new organs in what hospital officials Monday described as the first-ever quintuple kidney transplant. All five recipients--three men and two women--were doing fine, as were the five organ donors, all women, said Eric Vohr, a spokesman at the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Transplant Center. The 10 participants came from Canada, Maine, Maryland, West Virginia, Florida and California.

Dear Ann Landers: My sister, "Janet," has been abusing her body for years--pills, cocaine, alcohol, the whole nine yards. Her health is poor, and now, her kidneys have failed. We learned a few days ago that she needs a transplant. I am the only matching donor in our family. The problem is, I don't want to donate my kidney to Janet. I don't see why I should risk my life and give her one of my kidneys just because she refused to take proper care of herself. Janet has always been my parents' favorite and is spoiled rotten.

A 15-year-old North Carolina middle school student received a new kidney from his science teacher, and both recipient and donor in the transplant were doing well Saturday, a hospital spokeswoman said. Students at R. Max Abbott Middle School in Fayetteville cheered after learning Friday that classmate Michael Carter and teacher Jane Smith had weathered the operation successfully. Carter was born with renal disease and began dialysis treatment when the smaller kidney failed.

An Air Force technical sergeant is recovering from surgery that made her the first participant in a third-person kidney donor program: She gave a kidney to a stranger to put her brother at the top of a waiting list. Michelle Long's brother, Don Long, needs a kidney, but neither she nor two other siblings were compatible donors. Instead, Long gave one of her kidneys last month to a stranger through the living-donor program of the Regional Transplant Consortium, made up of transplant centers in Washington, Virginia and Maryland.